This invention relates to sports accessories and exercise equipment, and more particularly, to a wrist saver device for use in yoga, pushups, hand stands, dips and other upper body weight bearing exercises.
Yoga can be useful for exercise, cardiovascular workout, improving flexibility, increasing strength and endurance, relieving hypertension, improving physical health and well being and for physical, mental and medical therapy. According to a market study, 6.1 percent, or nearly 14 million Americans, indicate that a doctor or therapist has recommended yoga to them. Also, nearly 45% of all adults agree that yoga would be beneficial if they were undergoing treatment for a medical condition. Yoga as medicine represents the next great yoga wave. In the future, we expect to see a lot more yoga in health care settings and more yoga recommended by the medical community as new research shows that yoga is a valuable therapeutic tool for many health conditions.
Yoga has become very popular. According to a Yoga Journal survey 49.4% of yoga participants are over the age of 35 with 18.4% of those over the age of 55. This more mature demographic often have less range of motion in their wrists, making a 90 degree right angle or perpendicular position between the hand and forearm difficult and painful.
It is not uncommon for people to experience wrist problems and pain when doing weight bearing exercises, such as pushups or yoga poses (asanas), such as sun salutations, planks, crane poses, etc. Indeed, many people when doing yoga or other weight bearing exercises experience pain in their wrist joint. Typically, the user's hands are at a 90 degree angle right or perpendicular to their forearm when doing weight bearing exercises on the hands, such as with traditional pushups. This can put excess stress on the wrist joints causing pain for many people.
Almost every yoga class includes people who complain of wrist problems. Perhaps their difficulties began with long hours at a computer keyboard or with a hard fall on an outstretched hand or even with doing asanas. Whatever the cause, the problem can be exacerbated by bearing weight on their hands in yoga. Yet such weight bearing is a very important part of asana practice.
Most people, who have had a wrist problem, know how much it can interfere with yoga. Wrist injuries can be especially demoralizing if the yoga exerciser (yogi) prefer a vinyasa-based style, in which the weight of the hands are placed over and over again as the exerciser performs and flows through the classic Sun Salutation series, which includes plank pose, chaturanga dandasana, i.e. four-limbed staff pose, urdhva mukha svanasan, i.e. an upward-facing dog pose, and adho mukha sanasana, i.e. a downward-facing dog pose.
Weight bearing on the arms seems to bring out the wrist's vulnerability since the wrist is a relatively small joint with delicate tissues that are packed into this small area. The wrist tissues include ligaments that knit the wrist bones together, as well as tendons that connect the forearm muscles to the fingers and help give the fingers their dexterity. Strain or irritation in tendons in the wrist can be a major factor in wrist pain.
To understand what causes wrist pain, it is useful to consider the structure and function of a normal wrist. The wrist helps with control of the fine motor activities of the fingers and thumb by positioning and stabilizing the hand, which allows the hand to accomplish various tasks, such as writing, drawing, sewing, etc. Most of the wrist's movement occurs at the juncture of the radius, i.e. one of the two forearm bones, and several of the carpal bones, which are located and sit deep in the heel of the hand. Some movement also occurs at the junctures between the individual carpal bones.
The movements of the wrist include abduction, i.e. bending the thumb side of the hand toward the thumb side of the forearm, adduction, i.e. bending the little-finger side of the hand toward the little-finger side of the forearm, flexion, and extension. In yoga, by far the most important of these and probably the one most likely to bring a person grief is extension.
To feel wrist movement, one can sit in a chair with armrests and position their forearms on an armrest, with their palms facing the floor. By cocking their hand up and pointing their fingers toward the ceiling, their wrists are now in extension. If the hands drape over the end of the armrest and the fingers point toward the floor, their wrist will be in flexion.
Many people spend time every day with their wrists in mild extension. The hand has its most powerful grip in this alignment and this position is the one people use most often in their daily activities. The wrists of most people spend very little time in full flexion or full extension.
Since the wrist, like any joint, will lose any part of its range of motion that isn't used regularly, most people gradually lose their ability to move easily and safely into full wrist extension, i.e. a 90 degree right angle and perpendicular to the hand and forearm.
When a person does a yoga pose in which they bear most or all of their weight on their hands, their wrists becomes extended. Many of the yoga positions require the yoga practitioner to balance their wrists, which can sometime cause sharp pain. Several of the postures in sun salutation, i.e. plank, chaturanga dandasana, urdhva mukha svanasan, require full extension, so performing the series over and over, can put a cumulatively heavy load, stress and strain on the wrists. Arm balances, such as bakasana, i.e. crane pose, and adho mukha vrksasana i.e. handstand, can aggravate the problem, as well as stress and strain on the wrist by pressing all of their body weight into their wrists while they are fully extended. Combining extreme range of motion with a heavy load and multiple repetitions can increase wrist strain. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the wrists of the person (exerciser) become painful. A substantial part of yoga practitioners' wrist pain can be caused by soft-tissue strain that occurs when the ligaments and tendons are forced into extension beyond their customary range.
Many yoga enthusiasts (yogis) are finding that their wrists often can't hold up to the weight bearing poses that are an integral part of yoga. This occurs because in most daily activities people rarely have their wrists in the full extension position, i.e. when the back of the hand is 90 degrees from the forearm as when they are performing pushups and supporting their body weight in this position. As a result, over time people lose their full range of motion.
Yoga has often been cited as the panacea by yogis for overcoming all sorts of life's ailments including joint pain. However, for many yogis whose wrists are more use to a computer keyboard then a sun salutation, wrist pain is often the first twist they encounter when starting a yoga regimen. Many people doing yoga or other weight bearing exercises complain of wrist pain.
Working up a sweat is great for cardiovascular health, but not when it makes their hands slip and slide on the mat or the floor.
Carpal tunnel syndrome is a fairly common, painful condition caused when the narrow tunnel formed by the carpal bones and adjacent ligaments puts pressure on the median nerve and finger flexor tendons that pass through the tunnel.
Various accessories, equipment and devices have been developed or suggested over the years to alleviate or eliminate the preceding problems. However, most of these prior art conventional accessories, equipment and devices are cumbersome, difficult to use, not practical, and have been unsuccessful in alleviating and eliminating these problems.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a wrist saver device, which overcomes most, if not all, of the preceding disadvantages.